Saturday, 29 June 2013

The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain (ZX Spectrum)

THE WARLOCK OF FIRETOP MOUNTAIN (ZX
Spectrum)

Crystal Computing

Reviewed by Mark Lain

The sudden
runaway success of FF coincided conveniently with home computers experiencing
the same boom, in particular the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. It’s hard in retrospect
to grasp the concept of a computer with 48K of memory (or a monumental 64K in
the case of the Commodore!) being the pinnacles of achievement in personal computers
to date, but that was the case in 1984 when the ZX Spectrum arcade adaptation
of the first FF book appeared on the shelves in high street stores everywhere.
I remember this game coming out. I also remember having no interest in it at
all at the time in spite of being an avid Spectrum user. I was a purist - FF
came in book form and shouldn’t be messed about with, but I did succumb a few
years later and borrowed the Spectrum version from a friend. As with all
Spectrum games, this came on cassette and you had to sit through the “bleurgh,
blip, bleurgh, gizza, gizza, gizza” sounds accompanied by the epileptic-fit
inducing dancing coloured stripes up the side of the loading screen for the
customary few minutes and then wait and see if it instantly crashed as soon as
you started playing it. Surprisingly, this game was unusually reliable as
Spectrum games went and rarely packed-up on you as you tried to play it.

The cassette
inlay features a cropped version of just the dragon from the cover of the
original book as well as the original text font so you can comfortably expect
this to be a faithful adaptation of the book but in arcade form. A pretty
exciting idea, although you do wonder how 48K of memory, about twenty-odd
different BEEP command sounds, eight colours, and only one possible on-screen text
font will ever possibly cope with what would have to be a pretty elaborate
programme. As soon as you start playing, it becomes apparent that the
programmers have addressed these obstacles by ignoring the book completely and
attaching the title to a totally unrelated arcade maze that plays like a slightly
better version of their earlier highly-acclaimed (and almost identical) Hall of the Things Spectrum game.

There are
certainly some connections to the book, but these are no more unique to WOFM than to any other generic fantasy game.
You have to work your way through a big maze, fighting orcs, spiders, and slime
moulds (whatever they are), collecting 15 keys on the way. Eventually comes the
showdown with the Warlock himself and then you nick his treasure. So at least
the climax is the same, even if it’s dumbed-down to just a pretty tough fight
minus all the card deck, old/young Zagor, etc interesting intricacies of the
book version. As a slight variation, you carry a sword and a bow and can switch
between these at will, which makes it possible to kill both up close and from a
safe distance, which does add playability.

There are
some nice touches to this game, considering it came early in the home computer era,
so massive spectacle can hardly be expected. There is, after all, a giant leap for
mankind in terms of technical achievement from Pong to something like Halo,
and this game sits about 5% of the way in! Each time you restart the game, the
maze is randomly generated so no two games are alike, which is a big advantage
over the linearity of the books and makes replay an almost unlimited
possibility. It also makes this game very difficult as you have to start totally
from scratch every time and, with 15 keys to find, this is a lengthy
undertaking akin to the big map Spectrum games where you had to find stuff like
Atic Atac or Jet Set Willy (and even these don’t re-arrange themselves every
time you start over.) There is a touch of realism in that the encounters don’t
just shuffle from side-to-side along a line of pixels. They will actually try
to attack you and will chase you around the maze, which is quite clever and
realistic in the context of what was possible at the time. Plus, the creature combats
are very difficult because, before you’ve had time to select your weapon, the
spider or orc will have eaten up half your Health while you think about what to
do and find the right button on the keyboard, and it’s with the keys that this
game really becomes complicated. There are so many controls (all very close
together on the keyboard) that you either need to be an octopus or have a
second player helping you to stand any chance of being able to move, un-sheath
your sword, fire your bow, open a door, etc and get your mind and fingers
working in harmony enough to play smoothly. You know that when the control
instructions fill the whole screen you are going to struggle a) to remember
even half of them, and b) to be able to execute many of the moves to be able to
get anywhere.

Another nice
bit of programming is that the screen scrolls in all four directions, rather
than being a screen at a time that jerks over to the next page when you exit
stage left or right like so many games of the era do. Apparently, the
programmers only had three weeks in which to code this game so, credit where
credit is due, this is put together very well in terms of actual game mechanics
and the limitations of the era.

The cassette’s
inlay card proudly boasts that this is “a fantasy game with revolutionary
graphics” but the fairly simple human sprites, spider sprites, and orc sprites,
along with zig-zaggy red walls, on an otherwise featureless black background
are hardly going to take the world by storm (even in 1984.) Frankly, the
similarly-era’d Horace games actually
had more impressive graphics than this and the on-screen appearance would remind
me of the Spectrum game Tiler if it was
set at night. Marketing has a lot to answer for and anyone expecting anything
remotely resembling a computer visualisation of Russ Nicholson’s book art is
going to be bitterly disappointed. Indeed, anyone expecting an adaptation of SJ
and IL’s FF book will also be pretty unhappy with this game!

This was the
only attempt to make a proper full FF arcade game for the Spectrum/Commodore, with
all their future FF adaptations being more traditional text adventures with fairly
perfunctory screen images to accompany the written words, so credit has to be
given for trying something more interactive and playable, rather than just
putting the book’s pages onto the screen which is a bit pointless really as you
might as well just read the (better-illustrated) FF books instead. This game was
available in just cassette form or in a “Software Pack” with the book also
included so you could experience both the written and the arcade versions. This
must have been a fairly weird experience as the two are so unrelated (other than
the actual goal) that there are basically no connections in terms of
environment, events, or encounters, other than the tenuous link that orcs and
spiders (and Zagor) appear in both so the pack pretty much gave you two different
games.

On the plus
side, from the abstract angle of Spectrum games of the era, this game does have
some functionality that was rare at the time. From the perspective of an
adventure game, it is very different from the fall-back of just transferring
text to the screen and, even if it is just a blank maze containing nothing more
than doors, three types of monster, and keys, it is a welcome departure that
suggested there was more to come - for many, the pinnacle of this concept would
be Gauntlet which even came with
add-on levels on further cassettes to keep the game and your character moving
on in a more free RPG style.

Sadly,
approaching this as a FF-related computer game, there is little to recommend as
it could have been released with just about any other fantasy-style title and
you would be none-the-wiser as to what it was meant to be. The first release in
the Puffin Personal Computer Collection
just comes across as a blatant cash-in on FF's success and is basically just a
computer game that has nothing to do with FF whatsoever.